


alpha remix

by spookyawards_archivist



Category: The X-Files
Genre: An X-File Case, Angst, Episode: s06e16 Alpha, F/M, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-01-04
Updated: 2006-01-04
Packaged: 2019-04-28 04:28:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,697
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14441397
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spookyawards_archivist/pseuds/spookyawards_archivist
Summary: what happenned on Alpha when you weren't looking





	alpha remix

**Author's Note:**

> Note from alice ttlg, the archivist: this story was originally archived at [Spooky Awards](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Spooky_Awards), and was moved to the AO3 as part of the Open Doors project in 2018. I tried to reach out to all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are the creator and would like to claim this work, please contact me using the e-mail address on [SpookyAwards' collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/spookyawards/profile).

Title: Alpha Remix  
Author: probe  
catagory: angst   
What happenned when you weren't looking? Thank YOu: Maybe Amanda -- I am always so honored when you agree to look over my stuff.Thank you for   
being such a great beta. 

**FEBRUARY 1999**  
**BELLFLOWER, CALIFORNIA**

I'm tracking him. 

His is face on the computer screen before me, big nose, full bottom lip, dark hooded eyes. I almost see a little of the animal in those eyes. 

This isn't the way I track in the woods. In the woods I would follow his steps, and it would be easy because he would leave the undisguised and shuffling tracks of a city man. In the woods I would follow his scent. By now I would be nearly upon him. I paid a lot of money and now it is my computer that has his scent. 

Washington D.C. - his city.  
FBI - he hunts like I do.  
Small apartment in Alexandria.   
Basketball (this I don't care for) and running (this I understand). 

There are pictures of him. The way he looks: muscles hard, skin damp, eyes dark with his ambition, this I also understand. 

There are two photos of him at work. In the first one he stands over a corpse with the dark purposeful stare again. He is slender, graceful, gray-clad in his expensive suit. I am reminded of the gray wolves released in Wyoming. The magnificent gray wolf, once extinct, now nearly so. In this man is that wolf, a wolf both hated and revered, and I cannot deny my need to pursue him. 

The second picture is the more recent. In this photo is the partner, Dana Scully. I didn't notice her in the first work picture but I see she is there when I flip back. She stood to the side and looked up at his dark stare and I know she sees the wolf in him as well. 

In the recent photo he holds her up in the flash of police lights and the wide rectangular door of an ambulance frames them. In this photo, Fox Mulder's eyes are not dark and focused with purpose; his eyes are wide, the unfocused madness of the wolf who is trapped, who is rabid, who will attack. 

Dana Scully's shirt is stained with blood and her hair is messed. She looks unsteady, as if she might faint. 

The man I paid for this photo had a story. My gray wolf had caught his prey, but not until the man had nearly taken down his partner, ripped her body, her blood streaming down her shirt, red, warm, the heart beating in his hand. 

This I understand. 

**MARCH 1999**  
**FBI HEADQUARTERS**  
7:10 PM 

I shouldn't be back at work this soon, she thought. 

The elevator ride to the basement gave Dana Scully the chance to close her eyes, let her head drop forward. She knew she really shouldn't have come back to work so soon after what Padgett's accomplice had done to her. 

Padgett's accomplice. 

It was the title she had assigned him -- she didn't like to think of her attacker as a projection, as some shadowy creation of her would-be suitor's mind. She didn't want to count up the times a man who was attracted to her had also wanted her dead. 

Now she had a bruised spine and bruised ribs from being knocked to the floor. She'd also bled out enough to leave her light-headed and weak. Still, Agent Scully was needed back at work. There was no time for reflection   
or healing with the X-files back under their control. 

As she emerged from the elevator to the basement, she saw the light from their office and straightened her shoulders, smoothed her hair. 

Mulder had his back to her. 

"Aren't you going home?" she asked him. 

He didn't bother to turn around, "I am home. I'm just feathering the nest." 

He'd done his best to avoid her all day. Probably because of Padgett. Still, she couldn't begin to guess his take on what had happened: Was he angry? Upset? She was just too damn tired to care. "What have you got?" she asked. 

"Two merchant marines found dead this morning in San Pedro, in the hold of their cargo ship." 

She sighed. "You mind if I ask the cause of death?" 

"On the crime report it says multiple bite wounds." For the first time that day, he seemed to be genuinely trying to return things to normal, to what was comfortable between them. All right, even exhausted, she could bite. "From what?" 

"The Hong Kong manifest has the cargo listed as a dog." 

He walked her through the details of the case: a vicious dog that kills and locks the cage behind itself. Two victims dead of blood loss. Towards the end of Mulder's case outline, Scully realized she needed get to her car before another dizzy spell got her and put their truce on shaky ground. He didn't like her to be fragile. 

"Sounds like an X-File," she said, and left. 

When she was safely a block away, she pulled to the curb to vomit. It really was too soon to be back at work. 

**BELLFLOWER, CALIFORNIA**  
9:32 AM 

Dr. Detweiler had been impressed that Mulder knew about the Wanshang Dhole, a mythical animal from ancient China. 

And Mulder was impressed by Detweiler's claims that he had actually caught the animal. 

The woman he'd met on line, Karin Berquist, had told him that the animal, extinct now for 150 years,  
could never have been caught. 

Mulder had taken refuge in the budding friendship with Karin. Someone he could relate all the incredible facts of the latest X-Files   
without feeling, without history or emotion. 

He used to be able to do that with Scully, but things had shifted, and kept shifting between them. Or maybe they were only shifting inside himself. He didn't want those shifts, though. They reminded him of the disastrous combination of   
love and work that had comprised   
his relationship with Diana. And this was so much more intense. Sometimes he felt powerless against the storm Scully brewed inside of him. 

When he looked up from the crime scene, Scully was coming towards him   
with her huge black umbrella. Was it raining? 

He pointed at a patch of dog shit. "Watch your step." 

"Jake Conroy, age 30. He was employed as a customs agent by the Federal Government," she said. 

Mulder often relied on her to talk to the authority at the crime scene -- get the facts and leave him to do the part he liked best.   
It was one of countless ways that he had left off functioning as an independent investigator and melded with her. Which meant, he mused   
bitterly, he'd become dependent. 

That afternoon in his hallway, before the bee had stung her, he'd told her he couldn't do this job without her. It wasn't said just to flatter her into staying;   
he really didn't remember how to work   
without her at his side. He didn't know how to throw the switch in his head away from work - when to eat, when to rest, when to give up, when to move on - without following the pulse of her schedule and needs. 

What if something happened? Without her, he would be sucked down into the vortex of his work. 

"The bite marks match those of the victims on the Chinese freighter. In this case, it bit off the man's hand. There's some talk in the house that he may be involved in the theft of the animal and that it turned on him, " Scully added. 

"Talk about biting the hand that feeds you." Still lost in his thoughts about their partnership, he wasn't sure if he meant the dead customs agent, or himself, or even Scully. 

"Well, it does make sense. I mean, a victim and his dog are attacked inside a house with all the doors shut. It couldn't have happened unless the dog was being kept inside," she said, mistaking his lack of focus for his more typical envelopment in the case. 

She was only being a good investigator and a loyal friend and here he was blaming her for making him need her. He let the information she had given him wash away his personal concerns. The dog had attacked the victim inside the house? 

"If all the doors were shut, how did it get out?" 

They bantered a little more, but Mulder had already made up his Mind. He needed to see Karin Berquist. He needed to find out more about what they were up against. 

Besides, Mulder was curious to meet Karin. He remembered Scully when she was fresh from teaching at Quantico and only wanted to talk about cases and facts. He missed how easy that had been. He missed being able to work with her without feeling a hundred other things swimming under the surface: her cancer, Melissa, Emily, all the times she nearly died because of his obsessions, and now Padgett. He couldn't get past the way she had acted towards a suspect: defending him, going to his apartment, the things he had read in Padgett's novel. 

Mulder couldn't help himself; he held all of it against her. 

**DAYS INN**  
**BELLFLOWER CALIFORNIA**  
10:20 PM 

I had forgotten the feel. I stand in the dark, the chill of the night. I can smell the exhaust of passing cars, the greasy smell of the diner nearby, but it doesn't matter. Underneath is the scent of the wet ground, the mix of decay and growth that is particular to early spring. This makes more sense than the images on a computer screen. 

Dana Scully's door is propped open to the breeze. She is inside, sitting in a sea of paper. Her hair is wet and she is yawning and stretching.   
Fox is outside, pacing circles, trying to catch his breath after a run. He ran too fast and for too long for me to follow. I can smell them. She smells of vanilla. He smells of sweat and the mingled scents of the night. 

Once, when I was stronger, I might have been beside him, but the illness made my legs ache, the exertion hurts my head. 

I creep forward to see him better. The streetlights bleeding over his face and body, I could see the darkness in his eyes before he left. 

He sits on the doorstep to Dana Scully's room and unlaces his running shoes, then pulls the wet socks from his feet before he stands.   
He needs to feel the ground beneath him. He needs to shed the trappings of man. 

I understand this. 

Fox puts his hands on the doorframe, hangs his head. I cannot see his eyes but the darkness has descended on his whole being. 

"I'm sorry," he says to Dana Scully without looking at her. "I didn't know it would take so long." 

"The morgue was backed up," she answers. "It's no big deal." She stands to face him, but too quickly, and her blood cannot keep up. I understand this from my sickness, this moment when the body fails you. She takes a step to steady herself. 

He must have been looking after all because his entire body tenses. 

"Are you all right?" 

"I'm fine." 

He nods and I see that he is angry. She sees it, too. "I'm fine," she repeats. 

He slams her door between them. Then he turns to stand barefoot in the parking lot. The running shoes are cradled to his chest like an injured limb. I come forward from the darkness into the harsh beam of the hotel security light. His face softens from his anger towards her when he sees me. 

"Hey," he whispers. I want to come to him but it is too soon. He whistles but I can't stop my shudder, my pale fur bristling, teeth bared. I do no like to be called to. I do not want a master; I want an Alpha. 

The softness fades from his face then but he isn't even looking at me anymore. He's thinking of her. 

**BERQUIST KENNELS**  
**NEXT DAY**

"Karin? Karin Berquist?" There was something hopeful in Mulder's voice that puzzled Scully. He'd been silent on the ride over from the Conroy murder scene. She knew it was still the Padgett case. If he was going to bring it up, she would say it had been an error of judgment, that she had gotten too involved and paid the price.   
It was a shallow interpretation of what had really happened, of what had made the case so painful between them. She felt a bitter stab of certainty that it would be the version he would want. 

It turned out that the woman at the front gate wasn't Mulder's mysterious Karin Berquist. Scully joked to cover Mulder's strange behavior as he flashed his badge. Things felt more normal. 

The office was dark and cluttered. Scully wandered around it, tried to get a feel for the Berquist woman's connection with her partner. 

"Well, I've read her books," Mulder sputtered. 

Scully took closer notice of the bookcase. "Ah. The Wolf Inside. . . Dogs Don't Lie. . .Better Than Human. . . Better Than Human?" 

"She's not a real people person." 

Scully crossed to a desk, turned on the lamp and aimed it at the "I Want to Believe" poster on the wall. 

"Well, she seems to have made a connection to you." When she met Mulder's eyes she could tell he was embarrassed. She thought about the hopeful look he had with Berquist's assistant earlier, before he knew her name. Was he trying to provoke jealousy? Was this some kind of payback for Padgett? 

Scully sighed. They'd both suffered enough anguish from that case and she wished Mulder would just let it go. She would appreciate the old comfortable familiarity of their partnership. 

Mulder hadn't ever met the dog expert Karen Berquist; he'd only chatted with her on the Internet. When the woman finally appeared with an entourage of dogs and dog smell, the hostility that she had shown them had turned Scully's gloominess to resentment. Once they were outside, Scully laid into him. 

"What the hell are we doing with this woman, Mulder?" The gravel drive was hell in heels and it was making her even more annoyed that Mulder just expected her to trot along and keep pace with his long legged stride. "Did you hear what she said about dog intelligence being superior to that of a human?" When he didn't answer Scully shouted at his back, "Mulder!" She didn't care if it came out shrill. 

"She could be helpful," he countered, finally pausing for her to catch up. A clump of the drive came loose under her heal. When she stumbled he grabbed onto her elbow. His face a mask, "Careful." He made it sound like an accusation. 

She knew he'd seen her struggle with her luggage on the plane and counted her cups of coffee since they'd been in California. The bastard, she thought. His attitude reeked of condemnation at her every weakness. This had to be the Padgett case still between them. 

"I'm fine," Scully ground out. 

"If this case is too much for you..." he trailed off. 

"Isn't that the point?" she countered. 

She thought he looked as angry as she had ever seen him. "What are you implying? That I dragged you here to teach you some kind of lesson?" 

She brushed past him towards the car. She knew he wasn't following her to the car but she didn't dare look behind her. She hadn't wanted a scene here in dog woman's front drive and she felt certain that he was going to give her one. "I think you just missed your chance   
to tell me that pay back is a bitch." 

Scully let herself into the car and stayed busy organizing the loose papers and files she had laid in the backseat. From the corner of her eye she knew he had gone to talk to the fresh-faced assistant again in an attempt to cool off. They were going to drop it, then. 

He would come back to the car as if nothing had happened, as if Stopping to talk to the assistant was   
a natural part of their investigation. Scully rubbed at her eyes with her fingertips, tried to will away the tension in her head. 

**BELLFLOWER, CALIFORNIA**  
Days Inn   
4:20 AM 

Mulder strode across the dark parking lot to Scully's room. There were no connecting doors here and they hadn't been communicating well enough when they checked in to care that the rooms were far apart. 

Still, Scully had handed him an extra keycard, something not unusual if they were separated. He hadn't given her his in return. She was more likely to use it. 

The call had just come in: Frank Fielder, a dog catcher, had been mauled to death, most likely by their canine suspect. Could they come in first thing that morning? It wouldn't be a problem for Mulder since, as usual, he couldn't sleep and had been up working anyway. He was still in his suit from the day before. 

Mulder listened at Scully's door before he let himself in. 

Silence. 

She didn't stir from her spot in the hotel bed when he opened the door.   
Her ivory skin glowed against the dark silk of her pajamas and he stood frozen above her. 

He envied how she trusted the night, how easily she fell asleep, surrendering to the belief that all would be as she left it when she opened her eyes again. After all he had exposed her to in this partnership, he would have expected the kind of anxious insomnia that kept him company to visit her. 

Scully sighed in her sleep, shifted position, and a lock of her red hair fell across her face. Mulder couldn't keep the image of her lying on the floor of his apartment, red blood on her shirt, red blood in a smeared pool underneath her. 

What if he hadn't gotten there in time? If Padgett hadn't burned the book? 

He wasn't certain what saved her that day and it frightened him to pick it apart. 

All the events came so close together at the end and they all seemed to swirl into the image of Scully pale and lifeless on the floor. 

And all that blood. 

Lost in all his worries and memories, he didn't realize that he'd stroked the hair from her face and woken her. She watched him with wary eyes. So tonight she trusted the world enough to fall asleep, but she didn't trust him. 

Well, they were even then. He didn't trust her to keep surviving attacks by her admirers. 

"Mulder?" her voice was scratchy with sleep and he imagined crawling into the bed beside her, stroking the silk of her pajama top, touching her white skin. 

"Did something happen?" She propped herself up on her elbows. 

"Officer Cahn called," he told her. "There's been another death." 

She squinted at him. "That's the suit you had on yesterday. Weren't you sleeping?" 

He saw she had neatly laid out her clothes for the next day on a chair by the door. 

"They're photographing everything right now and canvassing the area," he told her, ignoring her question. 

She sat up more fully and rolled the covers down. 

He sighed. Her devotion to the work, to him, sometimes it all shamed him. Why couldn't he just make things easier on her? "Actually they told us to just get to the warehouse district by morning.   
You could probably get a few more hours sleep." 

He was a little afraid to look her in the eye. He didn't want her to find all his worry over their fighting and the memories of what Padgett had nearly done to her. 

"Lay down next to me," she said. She scooted over to make room. It was a peace offering in the push and pull match they'd been having. 

He really was very tired, exhausted even, since the Padgett case. And he was still angry with her: she'd nearly died, she had acted unprofessionally with a suspect, and she'd- 

she'd- 

He was having a hard time concentrating on his anger. 

Mulder took off his jacket and tie and then, looking back at where Scully had settled back into her covers, he undressed to his boxers and climbed in beside her. 

Scully's eyes were already closing and she was breathing the deep and even breath of a dreamer. 

Mulder reached a hand out to grip her wrist before he let himself drift off. 

8:34 AM  
**SIGNAL HILL,**  
**WAREHOUSE CRIME SCENE**

Blood in the air... 

Then, Dana Scully's perfume as she whispers to Fox... 

Then the smell of his sweat on his clothes and the smell of her on his skin. 

"I don't think Wolf-Woman is here to speak to me about this," she says. 

We are dressed all in black, Dana Scully and me, but not for the same reasons. Still, it is fitting that there is something the same about the two of us. 

Something besides him. 

"I'll take a look at the body," she says. The raw meat smell of the body on the ground; it nearly undoes me. When Fox's partner walks away, it nearly undoes him.   
He reaches for her but she doesn't notice. 

But I am loyal and I nearly grab her for him, drag her back in my teeth. The animal is that close to the surface. Dana Scully does not respect him. My lips twitch-curl away. The animal is too close. 

"I didn't expect you," Mulder says. His eyes are narrowed at me. I push the animal inside. 

"Dog eats dogcatcher," I say. My voice still working. The animal hadn't taken it yet. "Story's all over the news this morning. It's sort of uplifting." 

"Mm-hmm." He does not smile. He isn't happy with his partner, but he isn't happy with me, either. I must make him happy or he will cast me out and the animal will surface. 

"I'm joking." 

"Mm-hmm." 

In my mind the animal rolls to her back, bares her throat. "Sorry," I say. 

"That's okay." He looks at the body that I am trying not to smell. "You said that a dog or a canid only hunts what it needs," he says, "but I've got four bodies with bite marks from an animal that seems to kill for no other reason." 

"Unlike we homo sapiens a canid's motives are simple and direct. It would be an extraordinary case to find one who kills for sport. Likely, we may never know. I'm sure someone will kill it first." 

He looks back to the body, the blood, the mauled flesh. Inside Me, the animal knows a kill from its own kind. I can see it in my mind, the teeth bared, the lunge at a pulsing vein in the neck. Dana Scully kneels beside the kill. With her there is another man I don't know. 

A man with the scent of the animal. My nostrils flare and the fine human hairs on my body are electric, longing for the change. Not now. 

"This guy over here?" Fox is asking me. "He claims to have caught it once. Maybe he can catch it again. He's Dr. Ian Detweiler. Do you know him?" 

"No, but I dislike him already." 

He lies, this Detweiler. He tries to hide what he is from me when he knows I can smell his hide, his breath, the mark he leaves. And he knows me for what I am, too. 

"I've been over the area. If that was my animal there's absolutely no evidence of it-- no prints, nothing whatsoever I can find." But I know that isn't true and so does Fox. 

"But it's still on the loose," Fox says. Fox is a hunter and he is focused on the hunt. 

"How did you say you caught it originally?" I ask Detweiler, knowing he'll lie. He gives an answer I don't hear. 

"You admire it, don't you?" I ask him. 

"I admire its ability to survive," he answers. 

**KARIN BERQUIST'S OFFICE.**

Scully shuffled from one foot to the other. She'd had enough of wolfwoman's eccentricities to last her a lifetime. The aversion to sunlight, the superiority of canids sermon, the dark bag-lady-chic   
outfits, Scully ticked them all off in her mind. And then there was the way the woman stared at her partner. There was something brutal and possessive in that look that was really starting to piss Scully off. 

They were all gathered around the computer screen -- the only source of light in the damp cave that was Karin's office. Mulder had claimed the chair next to Karin, which was fine with Scully. The woman reeked of her ever-present pack of dogs. 

Karen Berquist had a dog print on the screen. "This man Detweiler said he could find no evidence at the scene, but with very little effort I was able to find several tracks on the floor of the building where the man was attacked." She was talking to Mulder, of course. Scully nudged her foot at a leg of Berquist's chair, moving it a fraction from her partner. 

"Did they tell you anything?" Scully demanded. When she stepped forward she put her foot between the chairs and moved Berquist a fraction more. 

"That this is a large, rangy animal with primitive, even preevolutionary aspects," Karen said. "It isn't perfectly visible, but with the computer I can enhance the prints so that you can see it. A fifth toe pad on the right paw. Canids only have four toes." 

Mulder put his hand over Karin's on the mouse and moved the pointer over another part of the screen. "Uh, he's got a vestigial toe pad on his front paws. Right there." 

Scully stared at their joined hands. What was Mulder doing? 

Scully still felt a little out of step with her partner, with where his mind was on this case. She had been surprised when he had taken her invitation and gotten in bed with her in the early hours of the morning.   
But the truce between them had been fleeting. 

After a beat, Mulder moved his hand back to his chin. 

Karin squinted at the computer screen, but Scully could tell the woman was effected by Mulder's touch. "The dewclaw, serving no purpose now. Although some believe it was once a prehensile thumb." 

Scully was suddenly certain Karin could sense the discord between the two partners, that Berquist was angling for an advantage with Mulder. "Just yesterday you dismissed the possibility outright, that a dog or a...a canid, as you call it, would behave like this," Scully challenged. 

"I dismissed the idea of murder." 

"But you'll accept the idea that it behaves in every other way like Jack the Ripper." 

Karin broke eye contact first. "I'm just going by the facts. In Chinese myth, the dhole can be evil, capable of opening doors, stealing wives and disappearing into thin air. Maybe there is some basis in reality for this trickster myth." 

Scully locked eyes with Karin again and then shifted her look to Mulder. "Oh, I'm...fairly certain there is," she said and then she left them. Her blood felt like it had gone to ice in her veins, the comfort of the morning snuffed out completely. 

* * *

Mulder flinched when he saw Scully   
sitting in the car waiting for him.   
It wasn't that he expected her to have left him, but that he had forgotten that she wasn't still at his side. How had that happened? He usually only got this lost in his own head when... 

...when he profiled. 

He got in beside Scully, key still confused at where his mind had taken the case. This was just an animal, wasn't it? He couldn't profile an animal, could he? 

He paused to look at Scully. She was fuming; he could tell. He tried to remember at what point she had left Karin's office to come out here alone. "Everything okay, Scully?" 

"How well do you know this woman, Mulder?" 

He wanted to smile at her possessive tone but the Padgett case was still between them: the memory of her sitting on the edge of Padgett's bed and the things he'd had to read about in Padgett's crappy novel. 

"How well do you know anybody you meet on the Internet? She likes to talk." 

"Well, I question her motives." 

He couldn't believe her gall. He wanted to remind her of the conversation they'd had outside of Phillip Padgett's holding cell. She hadn't questioned Padgett's motives or her own in defending him. 

But in another second, Mulder's anger was gone. His heart just wasn't in torturing her in retaliation for the jealousy he'd felt. When the little lovesick writer had tried for her, Mulder had never really   
felt his place threatened. And it wasn't the jealousy or the image of her sitting on Padgett's bed that still bothered him. It was her on the floor of his apartment, bloody, dead. 

"You're suggesting that this case was a way to get me out here, to meet me?" 

Scully didn't answer him and he finally did let himself smile. 

"I'm flattered, but, no. I don't know this woman. I'd go out on a limb and say there's no way in hell she has anything to do with those four people being dead." 

"She's enamored of you, Mulder. Don't underestimate a woman. They can be tricksters, too." 

Mulder remembered a time he worked in a kind of vacuum. His colleagues in the VCU, Patterson, Diana all talking to him, trying to follow his thinking or throw him ideas. It was all white noise. How had Scully found a way inside? How did he hear her voice when he was lost in his own mind? Mulder fought the image of her pool of blood, sticky and thick, in his apartment. He would have to worry later about her vulnerability and his own because of her. 

What Scully said had entered the profiling process going on inside of him. Had he underestimated Karin? Was she a trickster too? 

**KARIN BERQUIST'S OFFICE**

6PM 

"Where's Fox?" I ask her because she's come alone. This isn't right. The pack does not leave the Alpha. She should stay at Fox's side in case he needs her. 

"Continuing his investigation," she answers. She's come to fight. I can smell it on her, so can Cody. He jumps from the chair that she wants, tail between his legs. Cody is part of my pack, I am his Alpha and he knows his place. 

Dana Scully sits in the chair and faces me. 

"You're not working together?" I ask her. 

"No. This is my investigation." 

"Of?" 

"You." There, she has said it at last. She is suspicious of me. She knows I want her place and will try to take it from her. She has guessed about my disease, too. "Systemic lupus erythematosus," she says carefully. She knows the medical term. This is why I have to live in the dark and cover my skin. Dana Scully calls it photosensitivity but the animal inside me has always been nocturnal. 

Dana Scully sees a lot but she does not see the truth. 

"I've ignored the symptoms for years. I've always felt more like a wolf than a person," I tell her, because I want her to see. Let her see my power, that I am her superior because of the animal. I can hunt better and I can match Fox in sense and intuition in ways this Dana Scully cannot. 

"With Mulder, you found somebody you could communicate with, someone who challenged you. But that wasn't enough. You needed to lure him out here," she says. And she has let me see her power. 

"I lack your feminine wiles," I tell her. 

Dana Scully looks away for a moment and I think I may not have understood her completely. Isn't this what he wants from her? I'd smelled her on him this morning, on his clothes, on his skin. 

"You don't believe it, do you-- not for a minute-- that there's an animal out there killing? " she says to me and something sharp is in her pale eyes.   
She has a little of the sense, then, a little of the intuition. 

"I don't believe that this man, Dr. Detweiler, ever caught it. I lived in Asia. I know about the Wanshang Dhole." I want to lunge for her, tear at her white throat. I must stamp the animal down. "It was more cunning than man," I tell her. My words are triumphant and the animal is raging inside of me to be known, to attack. "More cunning than this man Detweiler ever dreamed of!" 

"More cunning than you?" she asks but I cannot answer her. 

"I'm watching you," Dana Scully warns. 

"You watch," I tell her, "But you don't see. " 

Day's Inn   
Belleflower, California 

9:40 PM 

When she opened the door, Scully was wearing slippers and sweatpants. Her hair was wet and dripping down the back of her t-shirt. 

"Pizza delivery!" Mulder strode into her room and his eyes raked over her body. She pulled her damp t-shirt loose from where it clung to her skin, feeling suddenly naked. She hadn't thought to put on a bra. 

"Ready for bed?" he asked her, plopping the pizza on the comforter. He opened the pizza box and lay on the bed, his eyes filled with challenge. "Because I can leave if you need to get to sleep early." 

"I'm fine, Mulder." 

"Eat something, then" he said.   
But he didn't touch the pizza himself   
and just chewed on the inside of his cheek. 

"I'm not hungry." 

"You've lost weight," he finally said. "A lot." 

Scully sighed again, finally closing the door. "Mulder, what is this all   
about? Padgett? I misjudged him." She looked a the floor and said in a softer voice,   
"I was flattered, maybe." She cleared her throat then and looked him in the eyes again,   
her hands on her hips. "I'm perfectly capable of acting professionally on this investigation." 

Mulder fiddled with a button on his shirt. He had the pained expression   
that usually meant trouble, meant he was going to do something irrational like take off without her   
or push the investigation in some   
direction that would put his life at risk. 

Scully remembered the early morning nap they'd shared. Wasn't he sleeping at night??   
Then she pictured his hand on top of Karin Berquist's hand at the computer this morning. "Mulder, I hope you haven't been holding back anything from me on this case?" She winced a little at the schoolmarm tone in her voice. 

"Now you're accusing me of being unprofessional?" His face was passive with the hard eyes he turned on to suspects. 

Scully had enough of his evasions. She stomped forward and closed the pizza box. The smell had been making her sick anyway. "Goodnight Mulder. " 

For a moment they stared at each other with the cold assessment they usually reserved for interrogations. Mulder swung his long legs over the side of the bed to stand but then sagged and let his head drop. The fight had left him. "I know you were flattered Scully," his voice was so quiet that she moved closer and sat on the bed beside him. 

He still didn't look at her, his head hanging down and eyes Closed. "And you were never unprofessional." 

Scully put her hand on his back. "Even when I drank tea on his bed?" she said sardonically. Mulder straightened but smiled back at her. 

"Well, according to his 'opus,' I got there just in time to save your-" Mulder waved his hand in the air "-your, uh, professionalism." 

Scully smiled then and it seemed to light something inside of him because he smiled back at her and all was forgiven. "I think we both need to get to sleep early, Mulder. It's been a long month." 

He nodded at her the smile still in his eyes. He cupped her cheek in one hand for a second and she held her breath. Then he let his hand drop. 

He seemed a little looser to her when he took his pizza box back down the hall to his own room. She closed the door behind him a little relieved herself. Maybe they could put the Padgett thing behind them finally. But then she frowned. She still didn't know what he thought about the case they were on, or what he was planning. 

**LOS ANGELES COUNTY HOSPITAL**  
**TORRANCE , CALIFORNIA**

Fox Mulder closed his eyes in the elevator. 

Mulder had spent most of the night sitting on his bed with the police reports and Scully's autopsy notes scattered around him. He wasn't really studying them. He didn't need to. He was just trying to decide the best course of action. 

The conversation in Scully's room had made him feel guilty for the rift between them. So what if Padgett had lured her in a little? It wasn't nearly the disaster his dalliance with that vampire had been. Kristen. He'd forgotten her name. 

Mulder's trust in Scully's principles hadn't wavered once concerning Padgett; no matter what he put in his book, she wouldn't have jumped into bed with him so easily. Mulder grimaced; no one knew that better than he did. 

When the elevator doors opened he found his way to Officer Cahn's room. The officer had been attacked in the night and was still unconscious. Detweiler was beside him. Mulder's muscles tensed. "What are you doing here?" 

"I'd heard what had happened. I didn't know how bad he would be. I thought I might get a description of the animal." 

"How did you learn about the attack?" 

"I'd been in contact with Officer Cahn. I learned through his office." 

Despite all last night's pondering, Mulder gave way to impulse with his suspicions, "No, you didn't. No, you hadn't. Officer Cahn didn't want to have anything to do with you." 

"He was going to kill it. 

Detweiler was trying to get away now but Mulder caught him in the hallway. "Does that frighten you? You aren't hunting this animal. You know very well it can't be caught." 

Detweiler looked to be panicking or very angry. "Then how did I bring it here?" 

"That's what no one can figure out except for Karin Berquist. She knows what was in that cage and she knows it must be killed and that's the thought she can't bear because she doesn't want this thing to be extinct anymore than you do." 

"You're not making any sense." 

The pieces to the puzzle had been set since yesterday and Mulder found relief in finally saying them aloud, "No, I think I am. You went to China looking for that animal and you may have tracked it as you claim but the rest is far from the truth. You found the Wanshang Dhole, but you never caught it. It caught you. You may not have known what was happening to you at first but you're well aware now that when night comes, you stop being yourself." 

"That's insane." 

"No, you become the trickster - a shape-shifting man who becomes an animal." 

Detweiler got past Mulder for the elevator but Karin Berquist was coming up on him in the other direction. 

"I protected you as long as I could," she told Detweiler. "I won't any longer." 

Mulder watched them both from a distance. Scully's warning to him in the car was in his head - Karin was infatuated with him and couldn't be trusted. 

He had two problems now. 

**KARIN BERQUIST'S OFFICE**

I am at the computer when he comes in. My pack is comfortable with him. This is good. He scratches a head and the dog gives up the chair. He is our Alpha. We are ready for him. 

"I can usually get a sense of a person right away from the dogs," I tell him. "Dogs are the best judges of character I know." 

Fox sits in the chair that the dog has offered him. He sighs. "I'm sensing something myself here. I'm thinking maybe I've been misled, that you haven't been totally honest with me about this case." 

I cannot hide the truth from him anymore and this is part of what I sense. He knows. He knows what Detweiler is and he knows what I am. 

My voice is hoarse. "I've been honest with you, though perhaps not myself. I was looking forward to meeting you. I wouldn't admit how much." 

His jaw tenses. He wants to talk about catching Detweiler, not about me. 

"I've got Scully on him, tailing him, watching his every move." 

"He'll elude her easily." I tell him that Detweiler will return to the hospital to finish the kill and I watch him call his partner and send her over to guard Officer Cahn. 

But Detweiller isn't going there and both Fox and I know this. 

He hangs up the phone and looks at me. There is no affection there, not even the distant affection of the Alpha that he showed my dog in claiming the chair. I will not be the Alpha female in this pack. I see that now. 

"I've sent Agent Scully to the hospital," he says needlessly. 

"Then we both know where she will be tonight," I answer him. "If you will not accept what I offer you, then I will face you as another Alpha." 

"What is it that you offer, Karin?" A muscle in his cheek is knotted as he waits my answer. 

"The animal." It is there, lurking under my skin and I let it show, just a little. My eyes are changed, I know, and my teeth are bared. 

Fox starts back a little in his chair. Then he hadn't really been sure, I realize.   
It was just a hunch. It was just a very good hunch. 

"I don't want that, Karin," he says. His voice is the voice of the FBI agent then. It is the careful firm voice I use with a cornered animal. 

"So you will stay trapped in that flesh with no one who understands what you could really be!" I hiss. It is difficult to speak with change held in place like this. "I know what you are inside. I could help you release it!" 

"No." Fox stands and in his face I see the disgust he has for me, for what I can become. "I don't want that," he repeats. 

"I had hoped you would hunt with me tonight." I say but the words are for myself. I do not know if he can even understand me, because I cannot hold the change back any longer and it has my throat now. 

Fox watches me and I think he is horrified by what I have become. In spite of this, his words are cold and low. "If I see you at the hospital Karin, I will put you down." 

Then he leaves me to pursue Detweiler on my own and guard his precious human female from me, instead. I will prove myself more worthy than a human woman could ever be. Fox will regret not learning the change from me. He will come to hate his human form as I have hated mine. 

I burst from the room ahead of him. I am hidden in the darkening line of trees. He will not find me. 

**LOS ANGELES COUNTY HOSPITAL**  
9:40 PM 

The only magazine nearby was a six-month-old copy of Field and Stream. To make matters worse, it was a copy she had read cover to cover while she was in the hospital in New York. Mulder had fallen asleep beside her after threatening that idiot green agent who shot her. Then Mulder had been out cold in the chair beside her bed for a solid two hours while she read his crappy magazine and worried over how fast she could heal and get back to the bullpen to keep an eye on him. 

The memory of her hospital stay gave her a moment of contemplation. She'd been back in the hospital after the Padgett attack to get checked over and then insisted on going home. Mulder hadn't had the chance to sleep in a chair beside her bed, to hold her hand until he was sure that she was not going to be taken away from him. He'd been so off balance since the Padgett incident. Maybe that was the problem between them. 

Suddenly, he was there in the hospital corridor with her, breathing hard like he'd gotten here in a hurry. Scully stood up. 

"Now tell me why you pulled me away from the suspect and chained me to this chair 'cause I haven't seen hide nor hair of Detweiler since I've been here." 

Mulder plopped down on the couch as if he was relieved to be sitting on another boring stakeout with her. "That's aptly put. But it's   
not yet dark. You should take a load off. 

We might be here all night." 

"What do you mean?" 

"It's Detweiler, but it's not Detweiler. It's something that he becomes." 

Scully couldn't keep the groan out of her voice, "Mulder... " 

"Through some blood curse, this man undergoes some kind of nocturnal transformation. He becomes the same shape-shifting trickster as that mythical dog." 

Okay. Fine. She was tired and she wasn't about to fight his theory without one of her own. She wasn't sure why they both had to be guarding Officer Cahn, but she was just grumpy enough about the entire case to let it go. If he wanted to sit here with her all night, then she would let him. 

He seemed to sense the question from her though. "He's going to come back here tonight to make sure his dominance isn't challenged. He's going to put down the threat he failed to eliminate when he attacked Cahn. Karin Berquist confirmed it." 

The wolf-woman at work again, Scully thought. "Mulder, the only thing Karin Berquist is interested in is you." 

Mulder just chuckled and shrugged. It always pricked her anger when he dismissed her, something he never seemed to figure out. Her voice was annoyed and bitchy, but she couldn't help it. "You're kidding yourself if you think that she hasn't manipulated this entire situation for her own purposes." 

Mulder picked up her magazine and she snatched it away before she sat down. He made her want to strangle him when he just ignored what she said like that. She was fuming as she leafed through the Field and Stream. 

The crack of a sunflower seed drew her eyes back over to him. He was smiling at her. "I've been listening to you, Scully." 

When she raised an eyebrow at him he cupped her cheek and pulled their faces together. "Karin Berquist has had an agenda here, to get my attention, to lure me in." 

Scully sighed. "She was trying to lure you, Mulder?" She couldn't hold her own smile back then. He dropped his hand from her face and she leaned in on him to close her eyes. 

"Hey, I remember this magazine," he said. But his voice seemed far away because her eyes were closed and she was already starting to drift. She reached out her hand to him and felt his close over it. 

2:50 AM 

He looked at his watch. Mulder had given her enough time with Detweiler. Karin was right in thinking that he had to be put down. Whatever he was, whatever they both were, Detweiler had lost control of it. 

The killing could only be stopped one way. The decision to let Karin destroy Detweiler was easier on Mulder's stomach that way. It had to be done. 

He would have to find a way to pull out from the case after Detweiler's body was found. He wouldn't risk putting Scully in danger from the animal that Karin could become, and he didn't trust himself to be strong forever.   
Karin was wrong about his not   
belonging with people.   
He belonged with Scully. He belonged to Scully. He'd needed that time by her side, watching her breathe, feeling her hand warm in his, knowing that she was strong and whole and he could rely on her to be his link to the world. 

Scully wouldn't have approved of his decision to let Detweiler die. 

Mulder checked his watch again. It wasn't too late to back out of the unspoken agreement he'd made with Karin. He stood and gently touched Scully's face with the magazine. She'd been sound asleep since she'd sat down beside him. 

"Okay. He's not coming." 

Scully sighed and stretched, "Well you've got no argument from me." 

Mulder hurried them both to the car. While Scully called the police for back-up, he called Karin on his cell. 

"Karin, it's Fox Mulder. If you can hear me, I know what you're doing. If you can hear me, lock your doors. I'm on my way." 

She'd picked up the phone but she hadn't said anything and she hadn't placed the phone back on its receiver. Even Scully heard the gunshot. 

"Was that Karin?" 

Mulder nodded and Scully stepped on the gas. It was too late, though. Mulder could feel it. 

**BERQUIST KENNELS**  
6:21 AM 

Scully stepped out of the way to let the police fingerprint crew dust Karin's desk. There were several theories floating around the station about Karin Berquist and Detweiler and it seemed like the favorite involved the two of them feuding over possession of an expensive, rare dog. 

The press had painted Karin as a militant environmentalist, willing to let her dogs attack humans to keep Detweiler from caging the Dhole. Then they made Detweiler into a con-artist and psychopath who would use attack dogs to murder so he could drive up the cost of a dog he claimed was the Wanshang Dhole. 

Scully didn't care much which version the police verified; she just wanted Mulder by her side on a plane home. He seemed to be taking Karin's death hard. Scully thought is was probably stress from having the Padgett case and this one back to back. She felt certain that if she got him back home and back into his routine, he would be fine. 

She'd left him to pack for the two of them while she made this last appearance at the crime scene with the local police. 

Someone had pulled the blinds all the way up to let the bright California sunshine fill Karin's musty office space. It didn't look the same that way. It didn't smell the same either. There was a big carton of Krispy Kreme coffee and a box of doughnuts sitting in the hallway. Karin's dogs were penned outside. 

It made Scully a little sad, even though she had hated the place the way that Karin had kept it. She looked at the I Want To Believe poster on the wall. 

"Does that mean anything?"   
The uniformed officer held a coffee out to Scully and she took it from him without looking. 

"Yes," she answered. "But not to this investigation." She looked at the officer and saw he had a powdered sugar mustache from the doughnut. 

"You want to take it?" he asked her and nodded to the poster. She followed his gaze back to familiar flying saucer image and smiled. 

"Yeah, I do, as a matter of fact. Have it sent to Fox Mulder in the X-Files division, FBI." 

The officer nodded and popped the rest of the powdered sugar doughnut in his mouth. "No problem," he said. 

Scully walked out of Karin's office still smiling. She would let Mulder think that Karin had sent the poster. It would help ease his mind. 

#### If you enjoyed this story, please feed the author.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Title: **alpha remix**  
Author: probe  
Details: 47k  ·  PG  ·  Standalone  ·  01/04/06  ·   Email/Website      
Gossamer Category(Keywords): X-File   [UST, Angst]     
Characters: Mulder, Scully, Karin Berquist     
Pairings: Mulder/Scully UST   
SPOILERS: Alpha   
SUMMARY: what happenned on Alpha when you weren't looking 


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